From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 16

Agnes, from a dream of unbearable loss, woke with warm tears on her face.

The hospital was drowned in the bottomless silence that fills places of human habitation only in the few hours before dawn, when the needs and hungers' and fears of one day are forgotten and those of the next are not yet acknowledged, when our flailing species briefly floats insensate between one desperate swim and another.

The upper end of the bed was elevated. Otherwise, Agnes would not have been able to see the room, for she was too weak to raise her head from the pillows.

Shadows still perched throughout most of the room. They no longer reminded her of roosting birds, but of a featherless flock, leathery of wing and red of eye, with a taste for unspeakable feasts.

The only light came from a reading lamp. An adjustable brass shade directed the light down onto a chair.

Agnes was so weary, her eyes so sore and grainy, that even this soft radiance stung. She almost closed her eyes and gave herself to sleep again, that little brother of Death, which was now her only solace. What she saw in the lamplight, however, compelled her attention.

The nurse was in was gone, but Maria remained in attendance. She the vinyl-and-stainless-steel armchair, busy at some task in the amber glow of the lamp.

"You should be with your children," Agnes worried. Maria looked up. "My babies are sitted with my sister."

"Why are you here?" "Where else I should be and for why? I watch you over." As the tears cleared from Agnes's eyes, she saw that Maria was sewing. A shopping bag stood to one side of the chair, and to the other side, open on the floor, a case contained spools of thread, needles, a pincushion, a pair of scissors, and other supplies of a seamstress's trade.

Maria was hand-repairing some of Joey's clothes, which Agnes had meticulously damaged earlier in the day.

"Maria?"

"Que?"

"Widon't need to."

Two what?" 'To fix those clothes anymore."

"I fix," she insisted.

"You know about Joey?" Agnes asked, her voice thickening so much on the name of her husband that the two syllables almost stuck unspoken in her throat.

"I know."

"Then why?"

The needle danced in her nimble fingers. "I not fix for the better English anymore. Now I fix for Mr. Lampion only."

"But he's gone."

Maria said nothing, working busily, but Agnes recognized that special silence in which difficult words were sought and laboriously stitched together.

Finally with emotion so intense that it nearly made speech impossible, Maria said, "It is… the only thing… I can do for him now, for you. I be nobody, not able to fix nothing important. But I fix this. I fix this."

Agnes could not bear to watch Maria sewing. The light no longer stung, but her new future, which was beginning to come into view, was as sharp as pins and needles, sheer torture to her eyes.

She slept for a while, waking to a prayer spoken softly but fervently in Spanish.

Maria stood at the bedside, leaning with her forearms against the railing. A silver-and-onyx rosary tightly wrapped her small brown hands, although she was not counting the beads or murmuring Hail Marys. I Her prayer was for Agnes's baby.

Gradually, Agnes realized that this was not a prayer for the soul of a deceased infant but for the survival of one still alive.

Her strength was the strength of stones only in the sense that she felt as immovable as rock, yet she found the resources to raise one arm, to place her left hand over Maria's bead-tangled fingers. "But the baby's dead."

"Senora Lampion, no." Maria was surprised. "Muy enfermo but not dead."

Very ill. Very ill but not dead.

Agnes remembered the blood, the awful red flood. Excruciating pain and such fearsome crimson torrents. She'd thought her baby had entered the world stillborn on a tide of its own blood and hers.

"Is it a boy?" she asked.

"Yes, Senora. A fine boy."

"Bartholomew," Agnes said.

Maria frowned. "What is this you say?"

"His name." She tightened her hand on Maria's. "I want to see him."

"Muy enfermo. They have keeped him like the chicken egg."

Like the chicken egg. As weary as she was, Agnes could not at once puzzle out the meaning of those four words. Then: "Oh. He's in an incubator."

"Such eyes," Maria said.

Agnes said, "Que?"

"Angels must to have eyes so beautiful."

Letting go of Maria, lowering her hand to her heart, Agnes said, "I want to see him." After making the sign of the cross, Maria said, "They must to have keeped him in the eggubator until he is not dangerous. When the nurse comes, I will make her to tell me when the baby is to be safe. But I can't be leave you. I watch. I watch over."

Closing her eyes, Agnes whispered, "Bartholomew," in a reverent voice full of wonder, full of awe.

In spite of Agnes's qualified joy, she could not stay afloat on the river of sleep from which she had so recently risen. This time, however, she sank into its deeper currents with new hope and with this magical name, which scintillated in her mind on both sides of consciousness, Bartholomew, as the hospital room and Maria faded from her awareness, and also Bartholomew in her dreams. The name staved off nightmares.

Bartholomew. The name sustained her.